Icy Dock SSD Upgrades for Laptop

With SSDs becoming more and more affordable, laptop users are replacing their current traditional SATA hard drive with the faster SSDs such as OCZ Vertex, Crucial RealSSD, Intel X25 and Kingston SSDNow. The downside of using SSDs is the price per gigabyte. With the majority of people using an 80-120 gigabyte SSD there can be an immense drop in capacity from their current hard drive. Now you can take advantage of the hard drive that you have replaced by converting it to a slim tool-less portable external hard drive.

icy_dock_ssd_upgrade_for_laptop

This is a solution from Icy Dock for adding capacity to computer while still using high speed SSD. Using your extra hard drive as an external hard drive is affordable since you already have one of the major parts of the solution. All you need to buy is a SSD, Icy Dock 2.5 external hard drive enclosure and clone software (optional). The enclosure is slim and light so it’s not a burden to carry around with you.

Upgrading your laptop with a SSD is easy. When upgrading to a SSD be sure that the used capacity on your current hard drive is less then the capacity of your SSD. To clear up space on your hard drive remove some of you larger files i.e. movies, pictures, and music and place them on another storage device. Here are the steps to properly upgrade your laptop.

Purchase a SSD, Icy Dock MB668 or MB663 series 2.5" Portable Enclosure and clone software such as Acronis True Image for PC or SuperDuper for Mac.
Install the SSD into the enclosure and connect to the laptop. Format the SSD to the desired file format.
Download and install a hard drive cloning software. We recommend and use Acronis True Image. Clone your current hard drive to your new SSD following the step in the program.
Remove your hard drive from the laptop and replace it with your SSD
Boot your Laptop up and enjoy the performance gain.

Note: Acronis True Image only works with Window based PCs. For Mac users follow this tutorial for cloning your hard drive: http://lowendmac.com/ed/royal/08sr/clone-mac-os-x.html

Icy Dock offers a different 2.5" external hard drive enclosures that will fit the needs of different computers and interfaces. The benefits of using an Icy Dock external enclosure is that it is tool-less and USB bus-powered.

For the Apple MacBook Pro we recommend the MB663UB-1S-1. When upgrading your MacBook Pro to a SSD the extra hard drive you will have a fit into the MB663UB-1S-1. It has similar design features as the MacBook Pro. It is thin and has a simplistic design found on most Apple products. The MB663UB-1S-1 is easy to install since it uses no screws. Just slide your hard drive in and use the included USB cable to power and allow data transfer to the enclosure.

If you have a Dell Inspiron, XPS, Sony Vaio, HP Pavilion and recently upgraded your hard drive to an SSD you can take advantage of your extra hard drive as well. Most of the newer laptop has an eSATA port for the MB668US-1SB. When using the MB668US-1SB with the eSATA connector you can get faster read/write speeds as opposed to the USB interface. With faster speeds coming from the eSATA connection dragging and dropping files is a snap. Using an external enclosure allows you to keep your SSD uncluttered.

Upgrading to a SSD is popular due to the performance gain. When left with an extra hard drive after the upgrade, converting it to an external hard drive can be very beneficial. Icy Dock makes converting your extra hard drive to an external hard drive a snap with there easy installation.

Recommended ICY DOCK 2.5" SATA Portable
Tool-less Enclosures for PC: